Back Home – The Dual War
by Warringer
Chapter 52
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Seran Chaktor, captain of the Bright Horizon, an independent Ferron 50MT freighter, leaned back in his seat and put his legs on the console in front of him, looking out of the ship through the large screens in the frontal part of the bridge, located deep inside the armored engineering and crew section.
The massive Ambur class freighter, with about one and a half kilometers length about half the size of a Tillmann super dreadnought, was one of the most massive freighter craft build by the Ferrons. There weren't many of them being operated at all in the Vega System, and the Bright Horizon was one of the few independently operated Ambur freighters.
What made his ship mostly unique at this moment was that, while the Jump Generator was standard for a Ambur, Bright Horizon was the first to be equipped with a Quantum 2 Slipstream drive and a Quantum 2 shielding generator that would normally be found on a dreadnought sized battleship. He had gotten both as part of the payment he had gotten to ferry relief goods to New Omelos.
And it was what brought him, his ship and crew out here. The slipstream drive and the ability to fly wherever he wanted to go without getting lost in Jump Space, as well as the temptation of finding new markets and explore the galaxy was the reason why Bright Horizon was now deep within the Zeltorin Nebula, a Null Slipstream Zone that expended several light days, not far away from his destination.
He looked out at the colorful surroundings of the nebula and the swirls of ionized and otherwise energized gas as the massive freighter moved through it. Sure, he could have flown around the nebula, but from what he knew, no one flew around the Zeltorin Nebula, as it's effects on Slipstream extended vastly around the Null Slipstream Zone and it would take longer to get around the nebula. He could have used Jump Space, but that would have robbed him and his crew the great panorama.
As he looked out through the monitors, he had to chuckle, thinking of the last few days. Especially when the Horizon had dropped out of Slipstream at Anzatur, a trade world about two thousand light years away from Vega. The Horizon had been the largest ship that was going to the planet and many, especially Galaxy Police had thought that his ship was a warship or pirate ship.
He snorted. It was hard to believe that the largest ships in the galaxy were freighters of not more than maybe five MegaTons. Another thing was that most freighters he did see however where either from a race called the Vree, with two MegaTons at max, or Galaxy Transporter ships. And it seemed that Galaxy Transporters were a subdivision of Galaxy Police. Or was it the other way around?
Anyway, Galaxy Police had made pretty much a ruckus, going on about regulations and trying to bully him away or into a contract with Galaxy Transporters. And the Vree hadn't been much better.
However, he had pretty much lucked out. He had managed to secure a contract with a large robotics company, Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. As far as he knew they were a large number of parts for their new "Genuine People Personalities" series of androids. It was about 49 MegaTons they had to get to their main production facility on Siruis Tau IV.
Even if the manager Seran had brokered the deal with, had been a little inept, he had seen that the use of one single freighter was costing less than getting ten Galaxy Transporters freighters to do it. But even than Seran had been able to cheat the manager a little, which had gotten him played half in advance, as well as essentially getting payed three times of what he would get payed normally.
The advance pay had also allowed him to pay a Galaxy Police fee. Seran believed that they were trying to get him to get out of business, before he even had started.
He snorted. Other people had tried that and failed.
"Unknown contact," his navigator suddenly said." Distance one tenth light second."
Seran sat up.
"Where does it come from?" he asked.
"It's coming from our rear. Sensor echoes are blurred by the effects of the nebula."
Seran narrowed his eyes. Something wasn't quite right.
"Marek, challenge them for their ID," he ordered his radio operator, who nodded in response.
"This is the Ferron freighter Bright Horizon," Marek said into the microphone." To unknown vessel, respond please identify yourself."
The response from the unidentified ship was the response, Seran had dreaded.
"Energy buildup."
"Shields," Seran ordered just as several high energy bolts slammed into his ship and into the armor over the reactor section, shaking the entire rear section of the ship.
"Rear Port Armor damaged, integrity loss of 60 percent, shields up. They haven't hit the gravity wave emmiters."
Seran pulled himself from the ground and all but growled in a low tone.
"How long until we can jump into Jump Space?" he asked.
"Three minutes."
Seran cursed that a Russian sailor would have blushed. Another hit slammed into the shields and shook it again, through much less this time.
"Shields down to 95 percent. We are gonna make it those three minutes. I think we should fire back?"
Seran grinned. He was glad that he had enough foresight to get Bright Horizon modified after his first Pirate Raid while en route to Rustoner. Back at Vega most pirates were only after the freight and sometimes ships, and let the crew go, so they had been able to survive.
The modifications had been done by a friend of the family, who ran a private slip at a larger drydock. Most of the money of Bright Horizon Freight as well as his private money had gone into the modifications. The hull over the engineering and crew section had been armored up with five meters of Aegis X armor, while he had added as much weapons to his ship as the 21st Amend of the Ferron Constitution allowed.
A dual Molusevel MI 22 Heavy Gravitic Cannon turret, the same as it was used on the new Hyperions, three Zernik PP 8 Pulse Plasma Motar turrets and eight Molusevel MG 14 Pulse Laser Arrays had been added in concealed compartments all over the engineering and crew hull, patterned in a way that allowed full coverage, especially towards the rear vector as most pirate ships came from there.
"Since they want all we got, lets give it to them."
His navigator, who also acted as gunner, grinned as his fingers danced over his console.
Large armored panels opened up along the ventral and dorsal hulls and the turrets of large caliber energy weapons moved to the surface. As two more salvos from the pirates slammed into the shields they swung around to face the cruiser sized pirate ship.
Minor corrections were made by the fire control software as it aligned the weapons and a light went up on the navigators console.
"Cutting energy to the drive to 50 percent."
The energy that was cut from the massive and powerful gravitic drives of the large freighter was rerouted to the power hungry weapons. As the drive needed very much energy, cutting half of its energy was enough to feed the weapons. It had the nice side effect of the pirates thinking they had hit the drive.
The navigator grinned and the screen changed to show the pirate ship, than he pressed his finger down on the fire button.
Being a form believer of the rule that there was no overkill, he had programmed the weapons to go into a rapid fire sequence that would last ten seconds.
The weapons opened fire and cycled their shots as fast as they could. The massive Gravitic Cannons fired once per second, while the Pulse Plasma Mortars and Pulse Laser Arrays fired several times per second.
The pirate was very surprised that his pray actually fired back. And did so with an arsenal that could be considered being the layout of a warship. And combined with the heavy shield of the freighter, he considered that he wasn't payed enough for this job by his unknown client.
The pirates rather low powered shield for a ship his size were brought down in little less than nine seconds, as the entire ship was mostly designed to hit fast against a target that didn't shoot back. Than the dual gravitic cannon did the rest, as two gravity stress bands or more than a thousand times Earth gravity went straight through the ship from bow to stern, turning the ship into two long and very dense strands of matter.
"Well..." Seran noted." I think we can forget the jump for now. Get back to full speed and get me a full damage report."
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Alina was relieved that Senkal was rather busy at the moment. He was very busy to work on new strategies and he had proven that they worked, when he had disrupted an unknown ship with his new tactics that had prayed on Doranian Transports for weeks.
Alina knew that the tactics he used were straight from the books, human books on naval warfare. Old style anti submarine warfare. She knew quite a little about it from her uncle and was able recognize it.
Other tactics involved spying on the enemy from a distance. Another thing he had from the books. But she knew that he had a few problems with his superiors, now that at least that tactic had proven to be a failure when a large fleet had literally played the Doranians to withdraw ships from the Narn front to defend a system against an attack that never came.
For a moment she closed her eyes. She had used the time and tried to come up with a way to get into contact with Earth. And she had watched CNN while Senkal wasn't there, carefully memorizing the frequency it was broadcast on rather than save it on the receiver, so that Senkal would find it.
It had been a short piece of info about old short wave number radio that had been used for a long time by many Earth intelligence agencies that had helped her find a way.
Following her gut she had used the pieces she had around here, stuff that was considered unimportant. A few informations about slipstream radio and transceivers. Stuff like that. She had found something that was similar to short wave radio, using the lower bands of slipstream. Just about any transceiver could send and receive it and even with little energy used to transmit, the range was long. But the frequency was unable to transmit digital data and allowed only analog transmissions. So language was able to be transmitted.
Finding a transceiver had been relatively easy. Since she was able to get around in the ship, even if the Doranians didn't like to see a slave outside the quarters, she had sneaked into a locker room, stealing a personal slipstream transceiver. Than it had been easy to set the transceiver to the right frequency.
The next part had been more complicated. Putting together something that resembled a report, but written in Russian, she had been able to do that even while Senkal was there to see her write. To him it had been some sort of ritual and when he had asked her what she did, she had answered that she wrote a diary. In a sense she was.
To find a code was even more complicated. Since she had been part of the KGB, even if she had been 'just' an analyst. But as analyst, she knew a few old codes. She had chosen a code that was pretty standard on Earth by just about any nation.
So she had encoded the report and began to record herself speaking the English letters in groups of three.
Now she had ended recording herself. She closed her eyes and pressed the transmit button on the transceiver before hiding it in 'her room'. She hoped that the Doranians wouldn't listen to that frequency and that Earth was still curious enough to listen to frequencies that weren't really in use.
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"0, 6, 6. 0, 4, 6. 0, 3, 2."
Admiral Macuso's face was showing a little confusion as he listened to the female voice speaking from the speakers of Marc Allen's laptop. He was pretty sure that the voice wasn't really human, with the slight rumbling in it, but he couldn't help but notice a very slight Russian accent in the English of the voice.
He looked at Marc Allen, a TNI code specialist, who was a man who wouldn't be out of place in Redmond or Seattle, idly noting that the mousy man didn't really make a good figure in that cheap suit. But Macuso knew that the man was a very good man in his area of expertise, having worked with NSA until the formation of the Terran Naval Intelligence as subordinate intelligence agency of GDI about three weeks ago.
All Macuso knew was that it had to do with a possible agent among the Doranian and that he, or rather Wolfpack Fleet was able to get closer to this agent to get informations.
"We have caught this voice message with several of the Beholder satellites," Allen said, not showing any discomfort while sitting in Macuso's office at GDI headquarters." It was transmitted with a low power transceiver on a not used short wave slipstream band."
Allen turned around the laptop, stopping the voice message and pulled up a document that contained the lines of numbers he had heard on the message.
"This is the complete message."
Macuso frowned as she looked at the screen and the numbers seemed to dance in front of his eyes for a moment.
"All I'm seeing is numbers," he said and looked at Allen, a slight sense of annoyance.
Allen nodded.
"It was all we saw also, and tried to get it through many of our decoder programs. The all turned up nothing. At least until I noticed a very similar pattern in the numbers."
He made a few changes in the program and the numbers separated into groups of three, most, if not all of these groups starting with a zero.
"Its a very simple code and one of the most basic of the information age. A simple ASCII code."
Another few changes in the program and Macuso looked at the real text of the message.
"Its Russian," he noted.
"It is," Allen said." But we have already translated it."
With that he handed Macuso a manila folder with the translated message. Macuso opened the folder and began to read, frowning as he did. Than he placed the folder on his desk.
"Can we be sure that this message is genuine?"
"Not hundred percent, but the message contains a few things that might confirm that the sender is human. And Russian. If we take the style the message is written in, we could even say the the person is or was a member of the KGB."
"A member of the KGB being a slave of a Doranian?"
Allen nodded.
"It is possible. We know that the Vree have abducted a good number of people and sold them as slaves later on. Mr. Von Bismark is a good example for that. So why not them getting a KGB member by chance?"
"Any idea who it might be? And from what time he or she came?"
"We're pretty sure that its the woman that spoke the message. And surprisingly the KGB was very supportive with giving us the names of any female members that have simply disappeared. We have three possible hits, through only one of them is likely to be our messanger."
Macuso leaned back and looked at the data specialist. He had to say that the man was holding himself very good.
"How can you be so sure?"
Allen chuckled slightly.
"Mostly because of the codename she chose, 'Topas'. As you might remember Reiner Rupp who was an Eastern German agent codenamed Topas in NATO until he was uncovered in 1993. The others disappeared before that."
"And what is the name of our 'Topas'?"
"Alina Ramius."
Macuso's blood seemed to freeze at this moment.
"Shit," was his only response.